If you are the gods let me tell you a storyfor your time is infiniteand my mouth will not be a part of itbut a whole through which echos without endthe memory that is your present and future.

There is a soccer game in the fog,men and women naked in the damp.

There is monumental applausefor every goal, in which they are punchedand kicked through the goalposts of the underground.

The clapping is like gunfire,like the clatter of an African rattle....

They say there is an outdoor cafein the middle of the universe

where many questions are answered only in skeletonsby the sages of East and West.

Inca and Pharaoh dine there,eating humanity and throwing the bonesunder the table to the Dogstar,whose sharp teeth of light gnawthem into ivory and ebony.

What do you call this reality that devours itself,and what is left after the meal is done?

This is a question for divine physiology.

Does the spiral eat and shit?

Is the universe an endless body,and when you are at the end of its fingertips,what do they point to—what do they wave at,what do they reach out to touch?

If life has a purpose how do you live?

If live has no purpose how do you live?

If living has purpose and you don't know it,where do you look?

Under which rock is the answer,under which stone has the absentee landlord left the key?

In the old wives' tales there are only signsin octagonal red signaling blood is the answer,and after that more blood.

[Enter the Feathered Man, silent]

The coldest horror is the little things,in matter of fact bureaucrats that eataway substance and gods page by page,who may have begun life in the wombas a mother's concertina,who gamble at cards in off hours,who shuffle papers,who spare children no smile

who requisition just the right number of roundsto gun down a mountain town,even its dogs

who have a precise quotaof infants smashed against rocksor thrown down wells

That's why the Spanish fight bullswhile we watch patiently.

The Conqueror broke only the fiercestcattle of the forest hand to handand like the Roman at Lupercal pays continuedrespect in sword against hornwhich with one quick flick can disarm him of his testiclesand penetrate to the intestines.

That is why the tribes first loved the Spanish,who were beautiful in their ferocity,with nostrils flaring overoxygenated blood.

That is why we bake them brownin the ovens of our women.

Let us be frank, my friends,for if we were blood enemieswe are all intimates now:

we are carving the stone blocks of two cultures,a multiverse of many tongues,with blind courage to be stupid as a fightingbull,

as patient as an unsurrendered chiefchewing coca leaves on the mountainside,like a squat tiger who is the jaguar.

Pizarro, standing below a hundred thousandcharging down, pissing in his pants,but standing his ground and playing usa peasant's veronica greedy for gold.

We ceded his viciousness the power of the airand he died of it purified, forgetting gold,to be reborn among us in stone.

The civil servants and gray generalsand talkative merchantswe will feed to the fish,for we honoronly the fiercest and purestand have one poet.

The best have now been summonedas fermented flesh, disappearing intowastelands and trash dumps as foodfor condors and giant rats,who carry them to the three-eyed tigerto be reborn.